Essays about truth by Mary Findlay - issuu

Importance of truth short essay - CUBAN SOUL …

One particularly contentious issue has arisen in connection withRorty's appropriation of earlier philosophers; prominent readers ofthe classical American pragmatists have expressed deep reservationsabout Rorty's interpretation of Dewey and Peirce, in particular, andthe pragmatist movement in general. Consequently, Rorty's entitlementto the label "pragmatist" has been challenged. For instance SusanHaack's strong claims on this score have received much attention, butthere are many others. (See, for example, the discussions of Rorty inThomas M. Alexander, 1987; Gary Brodsky, 1982; James Campbell, 1984;Abraham Edel, 1985; James Gouinlock, 1995; Lavine 1995; R.W: Sleeper,1986; as well as the essays in Lenore Langdorf and Andrew R. Smith,1995.) For Rorty, the key figure in the American pragmatist movementis John Dewey, to whom he attributes many of his own centraldoctrines. In particular, Rorty finds in Dewey an anticipation of hisown view of philosophy as the hand-maiden of a humanist politics, of anon-ontological view of the virtues of inquiry, of a holisticconception of human intellectual life, and of an anti-essentialist,historicist conception of philosophical thought. To read Dewey hisway, however, Rorty explicitly sets about separating the "good" fromthe "bad" Dewey. (See "Dewey's Metaphysics," CP, 72-89, and "Deweybetween Hegel and Darwin", in Saatkamp, 1-15.) He is critical of whathe takes to be Dewey's backsliding into metaphysics in Experienceand Nature, and has no patience for the constructive attempt ofLogic: The Theory of Inquiry. Rorty thus imposes a scheme ofevaluation on Dewey's works which many scholars object to. Lavine, forinstance, claims that "scientific method" is Dewey's central concept(Lavine 1995, 44). R.W. Sleeper holds that reform rather thanelimination of metaphysics and epistemology is Dewey's aim (Sleeper1986, 2, chapter 6).

Essay about Truth, Honesty, and Integrity - 507 Words

Rorty is a self-proclaimed romantic bourgeois liberal, a believer inpiecemeal reforms advancing economic justice and increasing thefreedoms that citizens are able to enjoy. The key imperative in Rorty'spolitical agenda is the deepening and widening of solidarity. Rorty issceptical toward radicalism; political thought purporting to uncoverhidden, systematic causes for injustice and exploitation, and on thatbasis proposing sweeping changes to set things right. (ORT Part III;EHO; CIS Part II; AC) The task of the intellectual, with respect tosocial justice, is not to provide refinements of social theory, but tosensitize us to the suffering of others, and refine, deepen and expandour ability to identify with others, to think of others as likeourselves in morally relevant ways. (EHO Part III; CIS Part III)Reformist liberalism with its commitment to the expansion of democraticfreedoms in ever wider political solidarities is, on Rorty's view, anhistorical contingency which has no philosophical foundation, and needsnone. Recognizing the contingency of these values and the vocabulary inwhich they are expressed, while retaining the commitments, is theattitude of the liberal ironist. (CIS essays 3,4) Liberal ironists havethe ability to combine the consciousness of the contingency of theirown evaluative vocabulary with a commitment to reducing suffering—inparticular, with a commitment to combatting cruelty. (CIS essay 4, ORTPart III) They promote their cause through redescriptions, rather thanarguments. The distinction between argumentative discourse andredescription corresponds to that between propositions andvocabularies. Change in belief may result from convincing argument. Achange in what we perceive as interesting truth value candidatesresults from acquiring new vocabularies. Rorty identifies romanticismas the view that the latter sort of change is the more significant one.(CIS "Introduction", essay 1).

We might be embarrassed about the whole truth or maybe we just don’t want to tell how we handled the situation so we remove our part or change our part from the truth.

As we have seen in connection with Rorty's attitude to science, it isparticularly Rorty's treatment of truth and knowledge that has drawnfire from philosophers. While a great variety of philosophers havecriticized Rorty on this general score in a great variety of ways, itis not very difficult to discern a common concern; Rorty'sconversationalist view of truth and knowledge leaves us entirely unableto account for the notion that a reasonable view of how things are is aview suitably constrained by how the world actually is. This criticismis levelled against Rorty not only from the standpoint of metaphysicaland scientific realist views of the sort that Rorty hopes will soon beextinct. It is expressed also by thinkers who have some sympathy withRorty's historicist view of intellectual progress, and his critique ofKantian and Platonist features of modern philosophy. Frank B. Farrell,for instance, argues that Rorty fails to appreciate Davidson's view onjust this point, and claims that Rorty's conversationalist view ofbelief-constraint is a distorted, worldless, version of Davidson'spicture of how communication between agents occurs. Similarly, JohnMcDowell, while also critical of Davidson's epistemological views,claims that Rorty's view of the relation between agent and world asmerely causal runs foul of the notion that our very concept of acreature with beliefs involves the idea of a rational constraint of theworld on our epistemic states.

Pragmatic evaluation of various linguistically infused practicesrequires a degree of specificity. From Rorty's perspective, to suggestthat we might evaluate vocabularies with respect to their ability touncover the truth, would be like claiming to evaluate tools for theirability to help us get what we want—full stop. Is the hammer or thesaw or the scissors better—in general? Questions about usefulness canonly be answered, Rorty points out, once we give substance to ourpurposes.

Free Essays on The Truth About Lying by Judith Viorst

It follows, therefore, that truth is the same for all of us, thus, one should be repelled by the expression that "what is true for you is not true for me."The second thing to know about truth is that the discovery of truth serves a purpose.